


Seventh Son

by zorilleerrant



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Trans Boy Ginny Weasley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 05:52:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14158185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorilleerrant/pseuds/zorilleerrant
Summary: Everyone told the Weasleys they were going to have another son. They should have listened.





	Seventh Son

The first time Ginny realized was at age six, almost precisely, because it was the day after the party (where of course Ginny didn’t have to do any work, because that was what birthdays were _for_ ), when there weren’t yet any words for how dad, sitting just there at the table, reading the newspaper, and a bunch of brothers (too _many_ brothers, people always said, and then nudged Ginny in the ribs, which was awfully confusing mostly) all shoveling food into their mouths so fast they might choke, and mum, still cooking even though the table was overflowing with every sort of food a six year old could imagine, which wasn’t very high in quantity, but had a depth of quality that adulthood sands the edges off, and Ginny on the smallest seat at the end of the table, ready to pick up a glass of grapefruit juice and take a sip, led to _come here, sweetheart, help me with the rolls_ and _Ginny, dear, won’t you get your brother some more eggs_ and, really, when was a boy supposed to get a minute to eat?

The first time someone else found out was at age eleven, the first day of Hogwarts (after the Sorting, thankfully, or Ginny felt sure they would’ve kicked him out on grounds of misrepresentation), after the Feast, after handing out the passwords, after several welcoming pranks played and scholarly wisdom handed down from the older students, after the station and the train and the shortness of breath, after nothing was supposed to be left to go wrong, after Ginny had finally thought maybe, just maybe, and had a moment of hope. Their Head of House announced bed assignments. The rest of the students all tromped up the stairs. No one tripped. No one fell. No one shouted or complained or so much as sneezed. Ginny took one step up the elaborately carved staircase and slid two steps back onto the floor, hurriedly pressing down his brand-new skirt made from the fancy pattern so no one would see the frilly underwear he hadn’t yet managed to grow out of, trying not to cry over the tear in his good tights so he wouldn’t ruin the morning’s careful effort mum had put into his face while he tried to keep still with his hands folded in his lap.

Not that there was anyone else there to see, because Ginny had been too scared to go first, or second, or even until everyone was out of the common room in case Hogwarts somehow _knew_ , which was slightly vindicating in that it was obviously a reasonable fear, and mostly awful in that everyone came out to stare and McGonagall had to shoo them off with some ridiculous explanation about the stairs being old and having quirks sometimes and they made mistakes, mistakes like Ginny, and then that knowing, pitying look while she spelled Ginny in specially, individually, an exception, just so he could have a place to hide himself away at night.

He lay down in the earmarked bed just the same as every other, his first night on a mattress that had always been one, lying on sheets that you couldn’t see through with a blanket that didn’t have to be spelled to stay warm enough, and wondered whether he even would’ve been accepted to Hogwarts if they’d known. Everyone always said the standards were lower for girls than for boys, so they could meet the numbers.

It was a year after that, in group, that Ginny discovered feminism, and started to feel really terrible about a great deal of things. And it was good and necessary and there was a solidarity there and people to talk to and advice, but there were _so many things_ that Ginny had simply never heard of before but that, on hearing about, made far too much sense. And there was no judgement in the group, because everyone knew traumas were different and everyone processed their traumas differently, but there was so much judgement aimed, well, away from Ginny, but with this awkward you know what I mean that Ginny, well, he didn’t.

Because it wasn’t true that the standards were lower for Ginny than for Ron (although there might’ve been more boys one year or the other, but that wasn’t the point), but it _was_ true that Ginny was taking a girl’s spot (if there had been more applicants and the numbers always had to be exact and it wasn’t just magic making it all turn out that way, which he was never sure about). And it was true that his mother shouldn’t make him do all the chores when his brothers weren’t doing any, but that wasn’t because he was a boy after all, and would’ve been true for any Ginny of any gender, and was he really worried because it felt wrong, or just worried because it felt wrong for him? And it wasn’t true that teachers graded girls’ assignments on an easier rubric, but it _was_ true that Ginny struck people as more innocent, more hurt, than another victim might have, because of a single fact that wasn’t even accurate.

And it was also true that men were cruel and took advantage, and Ginny could attest to that, with the way Lockhart ran classes and Malfoy lorded over the halls and Colin wouldn’t stop taking pictures and Dumbledore never had time for anyone but Harry, and Harry, and Hagrid, and the prefects who yelled at him for no reason, and the Ministry workers who yelled at his dad, and the shopkeepers who yelled at his mum, and even his brothers who were supposed to be nice to him but sometimes were and sometimes were vicious and mean. And _him_. And Ginny didn’t want to be like that and didn’t want to do that to people and set his mind to not being a man at all if that was what it meant. And there _wasn’t_ anything else if he could trust what his mum told him and where his mum sent him and what he could find in the Hogwarts library without asking, because asking was just asking for trouble, and if Ginny knew anything he knew asking for it.

It didn’t get better, the next couple of years. It only got worse, the more people started to make lewd gestures and lewd faces, threats and promises Ginny wished they wouldn’t promise, the more they cornered him into hiding his chest and never wearing makeup and unsure of whether it was what made him _him_ or just another way to run away, like taking the back staircases and using the one bathroom far out of the way that had a fountain in the middle and no sign on the door telling Ginny whether or not to enter.

Of course, Hermione was the only one he could talk to about any of this, and she never had more than half the story, only upbeat reassurances that some girls just didn’t like to be that sociable, because it was more a taught trait than anything innate, and gossip was generally sort of rude and inappropriate whether you were a girl or a boy, and fancy dresses were really more of a special occasion thing, and she didn’t like makeup either, and once they got past a certain size breasts were just sort of unwieldy which was especially difficult when you were running to class or even just exercising and she knew a very good binding charm that virtually didn’t feel like anything and stuck practically all day with maybe a little touchup during lunch and did Ginny want to learn it because it was pretty fucking useful (not to be crude or anything but she felt strongly about it).

Ginny did. And he was happy to note that with a little modification, the spell would bind _down_ instead of just _still_. It was short-lived, though, as always, because thinking too long about that sort of thing sent Ginny into an existential tailspin and drowned him in fears of internalized misogyny and whether hating his breasts was a symptom of hating femininity, women, motherhood, women’s sexualities, lesbian tendencies, or any of a number of other things he would rather not hate. He still used the spell, though. He used it, and tried not to philosophize.

And anyway, Hermione would hate him if she knew.

It was after the Battle of Hogwarts that he broke, like so many others did, screaming himself hoarse over joking comments about doing pretty well _for a girl_ , that he couldn’t even respond to with the gender equality lecture which was barely enough to tide him over in the best of circumstances because some of these people had taught him some of those lectures and even though you never could be sure about boys because there was only one boy Ginny had ever been sure of they never seemed like the type to say that and maybe he was reading too much into it and it was under duress and it was obviously sarcastic wasn’t it and the girls were making the same joke and the girls couldn’t possibly mean it like that because that wasn’t how their friendships with Ginny worked and it wasn’t who they were and it wasn’t who Ginny was and it wasn’t how he supposed to be treated but not like that, he didn’t mean it to sound like that, he didn’t mean to sound like that and he didn’t want his voice to break in the middle, tremulous as he tried to hold back the flood of tears, because all he needed was to tell people with snot dripping down his face, and it was an accident –

And it was blamed on stress, and he was called hysterical and irrational and attention-seeking, and it opened the floodgates on comments about his body that even the crudest of his classmates had up to then held their peace on, but he wouldn’t take it back if he could.

Hermione didn’t hate him after all, even if a lot of other people did. She wasn’t always there for him, the way she might have been, when life still had moments of silence that didn’t fill up with screams an entire generation had trouble pinpointing the fictionality of, when they could still sleep all the way through the night, when choosing between a whole mind and a whole body had still been a slightly morbid thought exercise instead of a crass joke at the expense of the people who would take either one. Hermione was there, sometimes. She was still his friend to the extent he had friends; if anything, she was the only one who didn’t start treating him like an impressionist painting, willing to walk right next to him, to look at him and still be sure of what she was seeing. (Luna might have been supportive, too. Ginny wasn’t sure. She gave a long-winded speech he couldn’t follow, but she smiled and shook his hand after, so he tentatively accepted what he hoped was well-wishing – Luna’s thoughts always ended more abruptly after the war, and she forgot nouns where she hadn’t before.)

Ginny wasn’t unique. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. Of course it wasn’t. Nothing in Ginny’s life was ever new. What he’d borrowed from his mother had supplemented the repurposed, the altered, and the secondhand, and even those he’d never preferred to his brothers’ hand-me-downs, though preference was a mutable thing when it came to fitting in and powering through. So there was a cut path, even if it wasn’t paved yet, and avoiding attention never stopped being a valuable skill in Ginny’s arsenal of slightly painful, slightly harmful coping mechanisms. It wasn’t unique. It wasn’t even rare. It was just another thing for people to lecture him on, as if Ginny didn’t know his own life.

To be fair, McGonagall had tried to give him a book about it, first year, before he ran away panicking, and probably still would’ve if he’d ever brought it up again. And the healers at the little house St. Mungo’s had sent him to were nice, even if they did seem a little out of touch with the world. Even if they did want to limit him to one therapist when none of them had any experience with combat stress, battle fatigue, war changes a man. Even if Ginny had to follow Hermione through the too crowded streets of muggle London to a specialist in yet another world, trying not to walk into people, trying not to flinch when a greeting was spoken too loudly, trying not to hurt children on the way to a secret meeting with a secret doctor who couldn’t know too much about his secret life but was the only one with up to date notes on problems that shouldn’t stay secret. Having to remind himself that hurting children wasn’t necessary anymore. Having to remind himself that it had been necessary before, it had, it had, it had to have been.

And it wasn’t that people didn’t believe him (well, Ron didn’t believe him, or any of the Gryffindors from his class, or Madame Pomfrey, or the boy at the grocer’s whose name he’d never managed to figure out and now was most assuredly never going to, but they could all go to hell), because his mum and dad had sat him down and talked through it a little bit, what they knew, which was bits and pieces and mostly hearsay and not helpful, but they tried. And there was sometimes Hermione. And there were almost-friends from school who got to know him better, and people he’d seen around that made explicit declarations of support. He got owls from people he’d never known, men and women and people whose genders he’d never heard of who wanted to offer advice. Support. Love. It wasn’t about the people who told him he was a lie.

It was that, from the people who did believe him, he got a lot of apologies about being harassed, and not for the harassment, clarifications of the insults, but no remorse for the insulting. It was that everyone who came to take a dress away said what a shame it was he didn’t want to wear them. It was that classmates who didn’t want to say anything mean tried to say something nice, tried to say how he really did look almost like a boy, or how they were sure he was attractive to someone somewhere eventually, or how no wonder he hadn’t been good at sewing but had done the quidditch team a service. It was that he got offered a lot of old shirts, a lot of old pants, but was he really sure he wanted to cut such beautiful flowing hair, so smooth and silky, that would take so long to grow out again. It was that a lot of his old friends would let him sit in solidarity, but wouldn’t let him speak anymore, as if overnight the childhood he’d experienced had been replaced by one where he was whole and humanized.

It was that his clothes changed, and he didn’t get yelled at as much. It was that his voice dropped, and he didn’t have to scream to be heard. It was that his body was his own once he hid his breasts completely. It was that his father looked on him with a pride he’d never had, because Arthur was himself a seventh son, and the family had come full circle.

Did he know, Molly asked, that they had considered the name Gawain?

But if becoming a knight and annihilating quests until he found the Holy Grail was what it took to set him apart from his brothers, well then, at least he could make a name for himself as Seventh Son rather than Only Daughter.


End file.
